Giving the people’s Bible back to the people

Charles Moore reviews Sixty-Six Books at the Bush Theatre.

The King James Bible is 400 years old this year. In that translation, St John ends his Gospel by saying that, if everything Jesus did were to be told, “I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”

It is a paradox of the Bible that it is supposed to be the only book that matters, and yet it gives rise to countless others. So it was a good idea of the King James Bible Trust, as part of its celebrations of the anniversary, to back Sixty-Six Books. The King James Bible (KJB) contains 66 books; now 66 writers have been commissioned to compose plays and other performances “in response” to each of those books. They run, with different books on different nights, at the Bush Theatre until October 29. There will be a 12-hour performance overnight at Westminster Abbey on October 21.

The Trust’s strategy for the celebrations is based on the assumption that very few people are familiar with the KJB nowadays. This is surely, sadly correct. With a handful of exceptions, you have to be over 50 to have been brought up with this Bible as the dominant one in church, at school or at home.

Although Bible studies thrive, and millions of people in Britain are interested in what the scriptures say, the single version, echoing in the head and heart from earliest youth, has almost completely disappeared. We can read the music of the songs, as it were, but we no longer know them by heart or sing them together. It would be absurd to claim that everyone once understood the Bible (how can it ever be properly understood?), but one can truly say that it was once deeply – and almost universally in the English-speaking world – known.

This knowledge is such a big thing to have lost that it has left people almost literally speechless. We find it extremely hard to imagine what it was like when the language of the most important truths was shared by prince and ploughman and everyone in between. If you mentioned loaves and fishes, motes and beams, bread and wine, your audience registered without you having to explain anything. In this sense, the KJB created a religious democracy. Once it was replaced by the new versions, most of which (remember the New English Bible?) quickly became obsolete, the people lost their franchise. The bureaucracy took control. If the words for the great truths are no longer held in common, how can most of us find them?

Because of this loss, the Trust believes that the first thing to do is simply to bring the KJB back to a wider audience. Its Chairman, the Labour MP Frank Field, wants it to be restored to the people who have had it taken away. Here it is, says the Trust – read it, listen to it, draw your own conclusions.

In order not to put off those who are irreligious or anti-religious, emphasis is laid on the range of the book’s effects. So a great deal is being said about the KJB’s role in the history of the British Empire, its functions of uniting the different components of the British Isles and, of course, its purely literary quality. No speech by Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Margaret Thatcher or Nelson Mandela, no poem by Milton or Wordsworth or T.S. Eliot (and, come to that, no story by P.G. Wodehouse), could have been remotely as it was without the KJB: without it “was not anything made that was made” (John I, verse 3).

This broad approach is sensible. One of the simplest and best achievements of this anniversary year is the creation of the YouTube Bible, which is still in progress. Different people read out different chapters of the KJB. The Prince of Wales declaims from the First Epistle of John. If Mr Speaker Bercow floats your bark, you watch him reading how Jonah took ship for Tarshish and fell into the belly of the whale. But for the most part, the readers are not the great and the good but “all sorts and conditions of men”. The text of each chapter is printed below the film of the person reading.

But once more people “read, mark and inwardly digest”, what will they think? In a way, the most important thing of all about the King James Bible is the one that gets said the least. It is hefted, through the English language at its best, to a particular people, but this fact should not diminish its universality. This is the story, after all, of how mankind has encountered God – how the world came into being, and how God came into the world. Within it is contained history, politics, law-giving, prayer, song, philosophy, visions, miracles, genealogy, and any amount of sex and violence.

The story is so explosive and dangerous that you can understand why, in those days, the very idea of a Bible translated into the vulgar tongue was controversial: anything might happen as a result.

My impression from the night at the Bush Theatre is that the authors respond to this primary, God-intoxicated fact about the Bible more than to anything else.

The less successful ones tend to develop their own themes and stick a bit of Bible in as an afterthought. The best – some of them comic skits about St Paul as the archetypal Jewish boy who disappoints his parents (it was Epistles night when I went), some sad pieces about addiction, or the death of a sister – approach an awe-inspiring fact. The message of this ancient text is: “Behold, I make all things new.”